Skill Challenges

The Skill Challenge system of 4E is brilliant in the simplicity. In a way, a well-designed skill challenge plays out like a combat encounter – everyone contributing by doing what they’re good at, without the situation sliding into a series of “I’ll do X!” “me too!” “I’ll try as well.” Each skill use moves that situation forwards, telling a part of a story how a goal is eventually reached, making each new use of skill interesting. Each failure has some consequences, but they rarely end up in a dead end (pretty much like combat rarely ends in the game ending). It’s a nice way to incorporate mechanics into roleplaying situations.

You’re tracking a killer in the city – You let the GM know that your character is using Diplomacy to ask around for possible clues. You roll – if you succeed in the roll, you gain info in the course of the scene and things move forward. If you fail, something else happens. Maybe you stir the wrong crowd or interrupt a group of thieves while asking around. Something cool still happens, even if you don’t make progress in the original plan to track the killer. Some other character then might use his Athletics check to frame a scene where he physically chases the man through the streets. Followed by someone tracking him using his appropriate skills. And so on. If your party fails too many times in total before finding the killer, he might have killed again, or prepared for your arrival. Succeed well enough and the heroes catch him off-guard.

Long term goals (A Skill Challenge might take days or week of in game-time), individual smaller scenes happening from player decisions, successes and failures that actually matter. Not just pre-planned encounters where no matter what the players do, things end up the way the plot demands. Or even if they do, there are at least a couple of different variations of how things happen depending on what they PCs do. Importing this into the 3rd edition isn’t any sort of a problem.

Enemies aren’t symmetrical with the PCs

In d20 system (that is, games like Pathfinder or D&D 3rd edition), everything is made using the same model – roughly you use same rules for player characters as you do for a goblin. If the enemy fighter uses a trick in combat, that same trick should be available to an equally tough player character. If he uses a move normally reserved for some other class, like a rogue, then he must have taken a level in rogue, which means he’s not as effective a fighter as he would be if he hadn’t. And so on. In 4E, the player characters are nothing like the rest of the things they come across in their adventures. An Orc from a certain tribe might use some strange combat move that fits the style he’s been described, even if it cannot be achieved by any of the normal combat tricks the players can buy their characters.

So when you come across a drow priestess who looks gleeful when you bring one of her soldiers to a near-death condition and on her next turn, she causes the poor henchman to explode into a million spiders, you accept this power. When the agile blade-master dances around you and counterattacks your counterattacks, it isn’t something you can buy with some feats or power choices. But you accept because it fits the enemy’s style, not wonder what levels of which character class he must have taken to get there.

Looking at the situation another way – the player characters are unique when it comes to levels and things like that. There aren’t any other 3rd Level Bards in the game, sure there might be some other people with similar abilities, but the only ones developing using the level scale are the players’ characters. An NPC’s skillset would be completely different, and expecting anything else would be a grave mistake.

There are also the Minions that are there to give even low-level characters the feeling of being powerful enough to fight a lot of monsters at a time. While I do appreciate the minion mechanic, it’s just not something that I’ll be using in the Pathfinder campaign. Importing the rest into the 3rd edition will be a huge effort, but hopefully pays off when the enemies become increasingly interesting to fight against.

Dynamic combat

The curse of the 3rd edition and variants is the fact that if you stand still and hit the other guy with your sword, you’re getting optimal results. Moving around is bad for your efficiency in battle. In 4E, the thing is to keep moving, gaining advantage from position, shifting, pushing, pulling, sliding your enemies or yourself. Using the terrain to your advantage… Heck, even swinging from one bookshelf to the other using a chandelier. Movement, movement, movement.

And there are these things happening around you – walls moving, rooms filling with water, giant boulders chasing you down narrow corridors. All while there is a countdown going on for a summoning ritual to complete that you have to stop or you’ll be in big trouble. While this all has been possible in 3rd Edition, it really became clear in the Fourth, where a normal combat encounter is really boring if you just keep hitting enemies with your powers.

One of the first awesome things that I realized about this with 4E was the new dragons, who at the moment they’re dropped to 50% hitpoints, roared in fury and hurled flames at the party in retaliation, even when it was not their turn to act. Then I noticed the goblins that move around when an attack missed them, literally ducking away from the blows to another spot. And soon it was apparent that the whole combat situation had moved from “I hit you, you hit me” fest into something where things were happening all the time and everyone was constantly moving. Another great discovery was the concept of marking enemies – you make the enemy want to attack you instead of the weaker, more vulnerable, target. This means that there is a mechanical reason why every enemy doesn’t attack the wizard first.

Transporting this feeling into Pathfinder will be harder, but doable – making the surroundings such that it becomes advantageous to notice what’s available to your use there, and forcing everyone to move around are a good start. And as I’ll be redoing most of the creatures and enemies anyways, I’ll have to add some forced movement into their special actions. Some are simple, like the goblin who moves whenever an attack misses or the ogre whose blows push the characters a couple of squares away from them. Other things will need some serious thought and planning, like marking or reactive powers for some monsters.

Encounters need objectives

Sort of close to the previous two. And really not something that’s anywhere near exclusive to the 4th Edition, but something that got really highlighted by it. Just hitting things with swords is really boring. But if you have to make sure you get past the enemies before the cave collapses, that’s completely another reason to fight them. Or there is a summoning ritual going on that needs to be stopped. Or you have to convince the enemies that you’re really not their enemies before they kill you – all while not damaging them.

Encounters that can be failed even if the player characters don’t end up dead are really that much more fun. They make doing the sword dance worthwhile time after time. Even if you fail, you’ve tried, and maybe have a better motivation to do better next time. It isn’t really much of a game, if the possible results from a fight are: a) players die, game ends or b) players survive, plot continues as the GM plans.

Since this one isn’t really about the system, but the attitude towards Encounter design, it’ll be the easiest to implement into a Pathfinder game. Just takes work to make every moment count.

After the demo, we talked about it for a while and the players were “Ooh, I want to play more with my fun character!”

And I was feeling really negative about it for some reason. Something about continuing the demo game further wasn’t “doing it for me”, but I couldn’t really name what was wrong, so I said a lot of “maybe”s and kept on smiling/nodding.

This morning, after spending good time wondering about it, it hit me. I want to get something out of a game I’m running. I want to challenge myself when I’m running games. I don’t want to get stuck on the same old, same old. I want to look back at a game and say that I did something new there.

The Summer DnD (I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog) is probably the last DnD campaign I’ll run using the 4th edition straight from the books – In it, I’m exploring the system, I’m trying to push it a bit each time we play, see how it works for what, all while having a fun game with it. But like with all the other gaming systems, I will want to move away from what’s been given to me. The next time I’ll start a campaign with the 4th Edition, it will be full of house rules, have a world that doesn’t look like the one given in the books on any level and will feel like my game from the start.

Starting a game based on random characters, made straight from the book, for a demo, just doesn’t qualify. It feels like doing the same thing over again, being bound by the same restrictions.

So, sorry guys, it won’t continue.

Since we’re half-way into the year, I thought to look back a bit and write about how things have been progressing and what my feelings about them are.

First of all, the good news. We managed to complete the Henryn viimeinen iso keikka -campaign. There was a lot of things in it that didn’t work out the way I had planned, but that’s what always happens when you’re creating a new RPG system and put it to playtest. Things need fine-tuning, a lot of it. But the basic idea works, and that’s the important bit. The campaign turned out to be a petty bet between two old criminal masterminds where people’s lives were put into stake for a single dollar and ended on a cliffhanger with all characters on their way to a possible trap. The great thing was that we actually managed to complete a full campaign run even if it was only 7 games + character creation. Our games have had a problem that they have slid to oblivion instead of actually reaching a conclusion. A way to restore faith on gaming.

Secondly, peoples’ timetables are a total pain. Both the Changeling and the Summer D&D games have suffered from this and even Henry had slight problems. Month or two long breaks aren’t unheard of because people aren’t around at the same time. But that’s life. I’m quite pessimistic with Changeling, since it’s 3 people who all need to be there for the game to work, and we can’t manage to get a time for the game together. And it’s one of those games that really suffer from long breaks as the mood of the fairytale needs to be recaptured and the not-fully-human characters re-immersed into. Game-wise it’s been a fun experience when we’ve been able to play – surreal landscapes are fun and the rules don’t come to the way too much. The Summer D&D on the other hand can surprisingly live even with the breaks. While I’m not fully happy with what D&D wants to be as a game, I am slowly seeing the potential in it. Lots of neat moving parts that are fun to twiddle.

About future plans regarding gaming – There will be a round two of Henry in the near future with the tweaked system. Also I might have gotten slightly inspired again to go try running larps after the Knutepunkt trip a couple of months ago.

I’ll hopefully get some more inspiration / time to write some actual stuff in the blog in the near future.